Natalie Davies quizzes the SSA’s Head of Communications Rob Calder on essay competitions – asking questions undergraduate and postgraduate students might have, including what essay competitions are, why enter them, and how to win them. Rob shares his views and experience on finding your writing voice, the importance of a proofreader, and what funders and employers are looking for.
They get you used to writing and developing your voice. The more you write, the better your writing becomes and the more you begin to write like you.
Natalie: Our friends at the Medical Council on Alcohol are running an essay competition for UK medical students on young people’s alcohol consumption. So, I thought this might be a good time to ask you…what is an essay competition?
Rob: Essay competitions are wonderful things. It’s an annoying answer, but the format they take can vary. Some essay competitions are academic and will award places for the most logical and reasoned argument or the best summary of the evidence. Other competitions will reward an engaging writing style. Some might be looking for essays that cover novel or innovative subjects. Whatever the competition, it’s best to find out what the judges are looking for and try to find winning essays from previous years.
You talk a lot about the importance of developing science communication skills in the addiction field. How do essay competitions tie in with this?
They get you used to writing and developing your voice. The more you write, the better your writing becomes, and the more you begin to write like you.
It’s a different kind of writing if you’re used to academic writing and requires different skills. For research reports or articles, you often need to be impassive and precise. It can be closer to technical writing than anything people might read for fun. And that’s quite right, scientific principles are at stake, and being specific and detailed is far more important than being engaging. For an essay competition, you will need to be engaging too. This forces you to think and write in a slightly different way.
When you’re an undergraduate student, the number of assignments can feel overwhelming. And then when you get to postgraduate level, the assignments grow, and there might be an additional expectation to submit articles to academic journals too. Why should a student consider giving themselves another deadline in the form of an essay competition?
Who knows why we do it to ourselves? I spent most of last year saying I didn’t have the capacity for anything else – all the while starting new things every week. Humans are weird like that. The easiest things to finish are the things you enjoy. This kind of essay should be fun to write, in which case it becomes easier to fit it in. If you don’t find essay writing fun, then I beg of you, don’t enter. Life’s too short.
Are you allowed to get help with your essay?
Read the rules – they may differ between competitions. I would suggest that all writing is better for having someone else check it over. I once asked a friend in publishing how I could improve my writing to the point that a proofreader didn’t find any errors. He told me that if that ever happened, I would need to get a better proofreader. Everyone needs a proofreader. The work must be your own, but talk to your friends about it, get a good proofreader, and then make the final decisions yourself – just you and your typewriter.
If I’m halfway through reading an essay and realise I’ve missed a paragraph because I’ve started to wonder how they get cranes on top of skyscrapers, then that’s going to be your loss.
Can you recycle old essays?
This depends. If you wrote a few bullet points eight years ago and now want to write them up in full, then yes, do that. If you mean the essay you submitted for a different competition with the dates changed using ‘CTRL+F’, then no, sorry. Write something new. It’s more interesting for you that way too.
What do you look for in a great essay?
One that doesn’t make me work to read it. Honestly, why should I make all the effort? If I’m halfway through reading an essay and realise I’ve missed a paragraph because I’ve started to wonder how they get cranes on top of skyscrapers, then that’s going to be your loss.
I like an essay that’s been proofread. Typos just get in the way and make my mind drift once again to the practical challenges faced by the construction industry. I also like an essay that makes me think about something I hadn’t thought of before – or one that covers familiar issues from a new perspective.
I like writing that’s an enjoyable read. But this is my preference. If the judge for an essay competition prefers dense, complex, and humourless writing, then you’d better get your Charles Dickens on.
What are some of your top tips for writing an essay fit to win an essay competition?
Review, edit, review. Look away and review it again. Read it out loud. Get feedback. And enjoy what you write.
And finally, do funders and employers care about extracurricular things like essay prizes?
Yes, they do – well some do. Funders and employers are a broad church and like different things. Implementation and science communications skills are increasingly being built into funding schemes and sought after by employers. It’s often not enough to do good research, you also need to demonstrate that you know how to talk about it. Entering (and winning) essay competitions shows that you’re more than just a good publication record and a 2:2.
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